Setting up a permalinks structure in Wordpress one of the things I normally do right after installing a blog, before event getting started on the templates. However, I always seem to forget what to put in the box so I thought I would put this here to remind myself and to go over the best practices on your own site in terms of SEO.
To set the permalinks on your Wordpress install go into Settings > Permalinks and enter the following into the Custom Structure field.
/%postname%-%post_id%.htmlThis will make a post on your site have a URL something like this.
/this-is-a-new-post-2.htmlIt is also possible to create a permalink using the category slug by using the %category% option.
/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%.htmlSo the post above would become the following.
/news/this-is-a-new-post-2.htmlThis makes sense as you will more than likely create a category with a good keyword structure, but can't always justify adding the keyword into the post title. There are a few other parameters that can be used here, including %author%, %year%, %monthnum%, %day%, %hour%, %minute% and even %second%. In my opinion the only one of any real value in terms of SEO here is %author%, although your authors would have to have some very specific names. Just be careful that you don't add too much to your permalink structure or your URL will be very, very long and completely defeat the point of the exercise.
Adding in the post ID will make the URL of the post completely unique, which is good for SEO, but will also stop Wordpress falling over when posts, pages and categories all have the same name. Adding in the post ID is also good if you want your posts to appear in Google News, although other factors are involved.
Adding a file extension to the end of the URL might have no effect in terms of SEO, but I am old fashioned enough to quite like it.
Comments
hello,
how can i change my wordpress permalink into site.com/%postname%.php?pid=%post_id%
please help me
thanks before
You go into your permalinks admin area and add everything after site.com/ into the text area therein. Although I can't imagine why you would want to do that with such an ugly permaking structure...
The reason some people suggest using post ID is not because of uniqueness, but because of performance.
This is taken directly from the Wordpress Codex (Using Permalinks):
"For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text "page slug" as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID."